Falling in Love eBook

of as persisting to live a sort of underground life
within the barrow. A stone hut was constructed
for its use; real weapons and implements were left
by its side; and slaves and wives were ruthlessly
massacred, as still in Ashantee, in order that their
bodies might accompany the corpse of the buried master
in his subterranean dwelling. In all this we
have clear evidence of a very inconsistent, savage,
materialistic belief, not indeed in the immortality
of the soul, but in the continued underground life
of the dead body.

With the progress of time, however, men’s ideas
upon these subjects began to grow more definite and
more consistent. Instead of the corpse, we get
the ghost; instead of the material underground world,
we get the idealised and sublimated conception of
a shadowy Hades, a world of shades, a realm of incorporeal,
disembodied spirits. With the growth of the idea
in this ghostly nether world, there arises naturally
the habit of burning the dead in order fully to free
the liberated spirit from the earthly chains that
clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable
fact that wherever this belief in a world of shades
is implicitly accepted, there cremation follows as
a matter of course; while wherever (among savage or
barbaric races) burial is practised, there a more
materialistic creed of bodily survival necessarily
accompanies it. To carry out this theory to its
full extent, not only must the body itself be burnt,
but also all its belongings with it. Ghosts are
clothed in ghostly clothing; and the question has
often been asked of modern spiritualists by materialistic
scoffers, ’Where do the ghosts get their coats
and dresses?’ The true believer in cremation
and the shadowy world has no difficulty at all in
answering that crucial inquiry; he would say at once,
’They are the ghosts of the clothes that were
burnt with the body.’ In the gossiping
story of Periander, as veraciously retailed for us
by that dear old grandmotherly scandalmonger, Herodotus,
the shade of Melissa refuses to communicate with her
late husband, by medium or otherwise, on the ground
that she found herself naked and shivering with cold,
because the garments buried with her had not been burnt,
and therefore were of no use to her in the world of
shades. So Periander, to put a stop to this sad
state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all
the best dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them
bodily in a great trench, and received an immediate
answer from the gratified shade, who was thenceforth
enabled to walk about in the principal promenades of
Hades among the best-dressed ghosts of that populous
quarter.